Shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2021. Patricia Lockwood’s sincere and delightfully profane love letter to the infinite scroll, and a meditation on love, language and human connection.

A social media guru travels the world, her entire existence overwhelmed by the internet or what she terms ‘the portal’. ‘Are we in hell?’ The people of the portal ask themselves. ‘Are we all just going to keep doing this until we die?’ Two urgent texts from her mother pierce the guru’s bubble. As real life collides with the absurdity of the portal, she confronts a world that seems to suggest there is goodness, empathy and justice in the universe - and a deluge of evidence to the contrary.

Shortlisted
The 2021 Booker Prize
Published by
Bloomsbury Circus
Publication date
Patricia Lockwood

Patricia Lockwood

About the Author

Patricia Lockwood is an American poet, novelist and essayist who was born in a trailer in Indiana and raised 'in all the worst cities of the Midwest'.
More about Patricia Lockwood

The internet – in the form of social media, at least – is much more like fiction than it is anything else

Listen to an extract from No One Is Talking About This

Kristen Sieh brings No One is Talking About This to life in the audiobook.

Bloomsbury Publishing · No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood, read by Kristen Sieh
The audiobook cover for No One Is Talking About This on a pale pink background.

Lockwood’s genius for irony is matched by the radiance of her reverence, when she lets it show

The road to the Booker